As a separate issue, and I will admit to no knowledge on the subject, but from what I have heard, hasn't it been fairly well established that having a gun in your house for 'protection' increases the risk of harm to the family?
( That's not me having a go, I'm just asking because that's what I heard from a number of reports and surveys )
This is really getting quite off-topic, but no, practically
nothing about firearms has been conclusively established, for a couple reasons. There are some studies that conclude (or are claimed to conclude) that, but they're rather full of holes. More on that, but as to why nobody proves anything...
Firearms ownership and safety is a highly polarized issue, by which I mean that most researchers have already formed a
very strong opinion, and so are unlikely to produce objective results. (Obviously, this
shouldn't matter -- it's possible to design research activities honestly, obtain data, and produce the results, whether you like them or not -- but in practice skewed and incomplete studies seem prevalent.) Secondly, you have two distinct groups, following different lines of argument (beware, mad generalizations coming up!):
- On the anti-gun side, the running argument is "guns make life dangerous, ban them", and it's academic-heavy, so the natural thing for academics to do is perform studies. So you get studies purporting to show how many deaths are caused by guns, or by certain circumstances combined with guns.
- On the pro-gun side, arguments don't center as much on "guns make life safer", although this point is made in passing to discredit the anti-gunners, and is generally accepted. They're more concerned with liberty and rights -- some will even go so far as to say that, even if it could be conclusively proven that deaths, violent crime, or whatever would decrease with a gun ban, they would still oppose it, because it's morally wrong to forcibly disarm people for their own safety. So they don't do correlation studies as much, but tend to write essays and the like on why disarmament laws are wrong, on the benefits of an armed populace against crime, tyranny, and invasion, and on why the anti-gun studies don't prove what most people think they do.
As to what's wrong with the studies, there's some serious issues with the data used -- IIRC, the big "guns in home 40ish times more likely to kill good guys than bad guys" study (aside from the whole premise that we should judge the safety a gun might provide by counting dead bad guys) counted gun suicides in the "kills good guys" column, when suicides were about 90% of the gun deaths; the conclusion, as usually understood, presumes that all or almost all suicide perps would not have killed themselves by other means if there was no gun available. Some studies use medical statistics which are
very ill-suited to gun control debates, because some medically unimportant details are not tracked, and make unreasonable assumptions about the missing data. Some studies count a bad drug deal between relatives in the "family member hurt" category -- technically a correct classification, but not what most people are thinking of when they read the condensed conclusions.
And finally, correlation does not imply causation -- given a correlation between guns in the home and family members being harmed, it could be that people in crimeridden areas are more likely to own a gun for defense, and more likely to be harmed, not that having the gun adds the risk of harm.
If you're interested in detailed analysis of specific studies, check
guncite.com.
Despite the lack of solid studies, I am fairly certain that shooting 10440s out of a gun in the home is unsafe -- I wouldn't do that if I were you.
